IoT home automation set to explode in 2018

With major consumer OEMs promoting interoperability and the OCF providing a pathway to it, the dream of an IoT in which everything connects to everything else will finally start being realized

By Richard Quinnell, editor-in-chief

At
the recent CES 2018, the Internet of Things (IoT) was on full display, with dedicated
areas for IoT infrastructure, smart cities, home automation, and more. And it’s
no wonder. According to the Consumer Technology Association’s industry
forecast, smart home products will represent a $4.5 billion industry in 2018, with smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo representing an additional $3.8 billion
in revenue. But the IoT currently remains fragmented, especially in the home
automation space, isolated by incompatible wireless networks and communications
protocols. That is poised to change, however, and the dream of universal
connectivity and interactivity about to be realized.

The
first inklings came with the pre-show announcements by consumer industry giants
of smart televisions that would serve as one hub of comprehensive home
automation networks open to third-party devices for seamless integration. Samsung
North America’s CEO, Tim Baxter, noted in his presentation, for instance, that
more than 90% of Samsung’s consumer devices — televisions, refrigerators,
ovens, washers, dryers, and the like — are now IoT-ready. Furthermore, all of their
consumer products will have IoT built in and AI support by 2020 and be able to
interact with one another and third-party products using the open SmartThings
platform Samsung acquired in 2014. Already, said Baxter, Samsung sells a half-billion connected consumer devices each year.

LG
Electronics made similar announcements later that same day. According to CTO I.
P. Park, all of LG’s consumer products are now Wi-Fi enabled and IoT-ready. The
company’s strategy calls for home IoT to have three key characteristics, said
Park. First, the devices will evolve over time. Using AI such as the company’s
ThinQ, consumer IoT will learn user habits and preferences and react
accordingly. Second, the IoT will be in a wide variety of everyday products for
the home, car, and office and will talk to one another. Third, the system will
be open. “The world is too complex for a proprietary, closed solution,” said Park
in his presentation.

The OCF demonstrated that it now has a
specification that allows diverse home automation products to interoperate,
realizing the original dream for the IoT. Image: OCF.

Having
devices operate in an open ecosystem that allows them to readily interact has
long been part of the industry’s vision for the IoT. But various efforts at
implementing that vision resulted instead in market fragmentation. Wi-Fi proved
too power-hungry to serve as the backbone; small IoT devices needed a different
approach. Protocols such as ZigBee, Thread, Bluetooth, EnOcean, and others rose
to fill the need but did not work from a common basis. The resulting IoT
devices could not work together across protocols, forcing early developers and
end users alike to pick the protocol that they thought might ultimately become a de facto standard. This uncertainty
restricted acceptance and growth of home automation IoT.

The
announcements at CES, however, suggest that the days of IoT fragmentation are
limited. Major consumer product companies are promising open systems for
home automation networks and implementing hubs that can bridge differing
protocols and connectivity choices, allowing third-party devices to work within
their systems as readily as their own devices. While this may still seem like
two different (and incompatible) systems contending for the same market, there
is one more point to consider.

Both
Samsung and LG are high-ranking (Diamond) members of the Open Connectivity
Forum (OCF), which currently boasts more than 400 member companies and which
includes more than 80% of appliance companies. OCF itself is a merger of
competing interoperability standards bodies now working to develop a common
ground. The OCF is trying to create a software layer that lies above the transport
layer for internet connectivity to allow devices using different protocols to
communicate with one another. The logical structure uses a client/server
approach, and through the use of gateways that comply to OCF standards, devices
will be able to interoperate. Both device-to-user and device-to-device
interactions are supported, giving the user a single app with which to control
all devices and allowing devices to interact via a shared artificial
intelligence.

In
December 2017, the OCF took a major step forward in realizing the IoT dream by
releasing its OCF Specification 1.3. This new specification addresses key
security issues along with interoperability and sets the stage for developers
to start bridging the gaps. The OCF also has a certification program to verify
compliance with OCF 1.3, meaning that consumers need only look for compliant
products and no longer worry about which protocol or wireless network the
device specifically uses. Users will be free to mix and match devices based on
function, price, and aesthetics rather than technology.

At
CES, the OCF was demonstrating this approach in operation. Their smart home
booth included 25 devices from 11 companies all working together using the OCF
network. Individual devices, however, might use Bluetooth, ZigBee, EnOcean, or
proprietary connections. The gateways provided the translations needed to use
the common OCF network. The LG ThinQ network was part of the demonstration,
with a refrigerator serving as the LG gateway to the OCF.

Marketing program manager for next-generation
standards Kimberly Lewis of Intel, representing OCF at the show, indicated that
the release of OCF 1.3 is likely to trigger an explosion of new, interoperable
home automation IoT devices in the coming year. “We’re expecting a hockey stick
of certifications,” Lewis told EP at CES. If realized, this surge in
interoperable home automation IoT devices should finally start bringing the IoT
out of the realm of mostly hype and plant it squarely at the start of fully
realizing the IoT dream.

This kind of architecture just stack an abstraction level on top of already existing "open" or proprietary protocol (EnOcean, Zigbee, Bluetooth ...).This is not new and a lot of multi protocol boxes does that (jeedoom ..)What WILL change the IOT (Internet Of things) is a real and direct networking to Internet. So implementing ipv6 (or 6LowPan) in devices.Otherwise you are just limiting the devices to what the gateway can provide and what your additional stack can interface, with a lot of problems like maintainability, without even talking about the recurring problems of backward compatibility of the so said "open" protocols